Tl;dr: I think a somewhat successful coverup of the supernatural would be a lot more probable than is easily believable in a truth is stranger than fiction sort of way.
In fact, this thread was made to point out that there will be tons of people with an easy source of evidence (to say nothing of the rest of the battle) that's really difficult to hide for common people coming in from out of town thanks to smartphones and jounalists. Once they see the obviously non-human bodies and the damage in no way caused by chemical weapons it's an easy step from there to accounts from Chicago getting out into the world from a trustworthy source.
Emphasis added. Finding a trusted source to distribute the information on this level of incredibility would be difficult when you're definitely going to have other sources saying it's not real. Especially if there is a large scale operation to discredit anyone making such claims. Another thing is that people might not pay attention. A good example of both of these is the government admitting it had alien space craft this summer.
(An earlier version of the Times article said Reid believed “crashes from other worlds” had indeed occurred, and that retrieved materials had been “studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.” The Times has corrected Reid's account, and Reid has since clarified his statements in a tweet, below. Popular Mechanics has updated this section of the article accordingly.)
This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
I have no knowledge—and I have never suggested—the federal government or any entity has unidentified flying objects or debris from other worlds. I have consistently said we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men. https://t.co/TcGxe0W43M
— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) July 24, 2020
The astrophysicist Eric Davis, who consulted with the Pentagon’s original UFO program and now works for the defense contractor Aerospace Corporation, told the Times that after he examined certain materials, he came to the conclusion that “we couldn’t make [them] ourselves.” In fact, Davis briefed a Department of Defense (DOD) agency as recently as March about retrieving materials from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a33413777/pentagon-ufo-program-materials-vehicles/. (I was looking for a different Popular Mechanics article about a Pentagon press release in which the Pentagon claims to have possession of an alien spacecraft).
The U.S. government has admitted that UFO's are very much a thing, that they're not of this world, and that they have them. The response from the public has been pretty underwhelming. And the former U.S. Senate Majority leader may have back pedaled a statement about it. I'm not so sure a Fox News or CNN field correspondent wouldn't backpedal really fast too.
Not to get into touchy topics, I'll avoid any specific real world examples, but I think most people can think of a newsworthy story that they haven't heard or have barely heard from the media, or one that the media reports really poorly to the point where what they are saying is almost, if not actually, the opposite of the truth. The media's coverage of science is a pretty good non political example of this.
That's pretty much what a coverup would take, sousveillance is fun to deal with.
New word of the day.